Liangbing Hu, Department of Materials Science and Engineering, Stanford University

Lowering the cost and improving the performance of devices are essential for making renewable energy feasible for everyday applications. In this talk, I will focus on discussing how abundant materials such as paper, silicon and copper can be engineered to create one dimensional nanomaterial networks (Nano-Nets) which allow us to manipulate fundamental particles in these energy devices to ultimately obtain remarkable performance. Conductive Nano-Nets using carbon nanotubes, silver nanowires and copper nanofibers for transparent electrodes in solar cells, silicon Nano-Nets for high performance Li-ion battery anodes, and conductive paper and textiles for ultracapacitors and microbial fuel cells will be discussed in detail.

About the Speaker

Liangbing Hu received his B.S. in applied physics from the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) in 2002. He did his Ph.D. in experimental physics under Prof. George Gruner at UCLA, focusing on carbon nanotube based nanoelectronics. He studied extensively the charge transport in carbon nanotube thin films with randomly distributed energy barriers and its dependence on geometry (nanotube length, density, etc.) and energy (frequency, temperature and field). He also explored the device applications of such random networks in field effect transistors, sensors and optoelectronic devices. In 2006, he joined Unidym as a co-founding scientist. At Unidym, Liangbing's role was the development of roll-to-roll printed carbon nanotube transparent electrodes and device integrations into touch screens, LCDs, flexible OLEDs and solar cells. Currently, Liangbing is a postdoctoral research fellow at Stanford University in Prof. Yi Cui's lab where he is working on various energy devices based on nanomaterials and nanostructures including Li-ion batteries, ultracapacitors and microbial fuel cells. His work has appeared multiple times in New York Times, BBC News, MIT Technology Review, Stanford News, SmartPlanet and many others in different languages. He has ~ 50 journal publications in nanomaterials, nanoelectronics, printed electronics and energy devices.